In 2010, Freeney was on an Indianapolis Colts team that looked nothing like a playoff contender as it entered the final quarter of the season. The Colts, coached at the time by Jim Caldwell, had lost three straight, and at 6-6 were looking up at the Jacksonville Jaguars in the standings. Miraculously, they won their final four games by a total of 20 points and made the postseason as AFC South champs.

Last year, Freeney was in a similar situation with the Atlanta Falcons. At 7-5, the Falcons and Tampa Bay Buccaneers entered the final month of the season tied atop the NFC South. Atlanta closed the regular season with four straight wins, and rode that momentum all the way to the Super Bowl.

"I think the big thing is that you learn from that experience that anything is possible,” Freeney said. “It’s just people like to write you off when you’re having an average year, but you win four straight and all of a sudden you find yourself in a different situation.

"It’s all about getting hot at the right time, and that’s what we’re trying to do here and this has to be the week for it."

The Lions visit the Buccaneers on Sunday with their playoff hopes on life support and in need of plenty of help to reach the postseason.

At 6-6, they trail the NFC North-leading Minnesota Vikings by four games and have virtually no shot of winning the division.

Their chances of earning a wildcard spot — a slim 8 percent according to FiveThirtyEight.com — aren’t much better, though Freeney and others are holding out hope it can be done.

"You’re not out until you’re out,” safety Glover Quin said. “So as long as you’re still mathematically in it, you’ve just got to keep fighting. Stranger things have happened. Stranger things have happened, and hey, you go out, you play, you win the games and you see what happens at the end. You just never know."

The Lions’ most realistic hope of making the playoffs entails them reaching 10 wins — winning their remaining four games — and then winning a tie-breaker with the Seattle Seahawks based on conference record or games among common opponents, or a three-team tie with the Seahawks and Carolina Panthers based on the same factors.

That may seem far-fetched — both Seattle and Carolina enter the weekend at 8-4 — which is why Caldwell reminded players this week of both his 2010 experience with the Colts and the Lions’ 2014 run to the playoffs while imploring them not to look past the Bucs.

In 2014, the Lions won four straight late in the season to secure a wild-card bid. If they had won the regular season finale against the Green Bay Packers, they would have won the division.

"(In) 2014, they ran it off here to end up in the playoffs, so he was just saying it can be done so don’t feel like everything is lost cause it’s not,” defensive tackle Akeem Spence said. “We still have a lot to play for. Granted, we don’t control our own destiny like we did before, just let’s keep playing and see what happens. Kind of that mentality.”

The Lions don’t have a team with a winning record left on their schedule, and Tampa (4-8) is arguably the worst of the four opponents they have left to face.

The Bucs have lost two straight and seven of nine, rank 31st in the NFL in total defense, are coming off a 26-20 overtime loss to the Aaron Rodgers-less Packers and — like the Lions — spent the past week enduring speculation about their coach’s future.

Caldwell, who’s been under intense public scrutiny of late despite signing a contract extension before the season, called it a “waste of time” for him to pay attention to those calling for his job.

"The first year I was coaching, those kinds of things were going on,” Caldwell said. “I mean, that’s just kind of the nature of the business, plain and simple. And if you can’t handle it, you ought to get into another line of work. I’ve been at it awhile, so I’m fairly accustomed to that kind of stuff.”

Despite the disenchantment surrounding the Lions, who’ve repeatedly gotten off to slow starts and struggled through turnover problems and a few coaching blunders in recent weeks, tight end Darren Fells said the Lions had “one of the better (weeks of) practices we’ve had this year.”

Spence said he’s confident the Lions can get hot down the stretch if they get back to forcing turnovers and stopping the run, and Freeney said he draws encouragement from the past in knowing that as bleak as things seem, the Lions aren’t yet done.

“That’s the thing about the NFL,” Quin said. “That’s why you play the games, you got to go do it. It looks a certain way on paper. This team should win or this team this. Every Sunday you’ve got to go out and prove it, you’ve got to go out and do it. So we can talk we got to do this, we got to do that. Sunday we get an opportunity, we got to go out and do it.”